Keeping Christmas

“Great-grandmother’s cherry bark tea will fix her right up,” Almeda said from her customary place at the head of the oblong hickory table that had stood in the window alcove since his father’s father was a boy.

Janet followed her sister into the kitchen. She was trailed closely by the twins. “Jacob. We thought you’d gone back to your cabin.” The younger Owens sisters exchanged speaking looks.

“I wanted to check on the furnace before I turn in for the night,” he said, not quite truthfully. He didn’t want his aunts alone in the house with that woman, although he didn’t want to say so and bring their combined wrath down on his head. He didn’t trust Kate Smith’s story, or her intentions, even though she did look sick and tired and terrified beneath her know-it-all facade. He wondered, briefly, what she was really running away from.

Kyle’s father? He wasn’t altogether certain he believed her statement that he was dead. The information had come too easily to her lips. After three and a half years he could barely speak the words aloud.

Was she fleeing a lover? That was more likely.

Or the law? Possible, but for some reason he didn’t think so.

“Jacob, I’m speaking to you.” Almeda’s voice cut into his thoughts. “Seeing you’re so worried about us having a stranger under our roof, do you wish to spend the night in the house?”

“Maybe I will,” he said too quickly.

Almeda narrowed shrewd dark eyes beneath white eyebrows. “The invitation is withdrawn if you plan to haunt the upper hall and spy on our guest all night long.”

“The thought never crossed my mind,” he lied.

“Yes, it did.” Almeda wrapped her gnarled hands around her mug of tea. “You think she’s going to murder us in our beds.”

Jacob laughed; it was rusty and almost devoid of humor, but it was a laugh, nevertheless.

Faye kicked Lois under the table but Jacob didn’t notice.

“No, but she might run off with all the money and silver in the house.”

“In her condition?”

“She’d never get out of the yard with Weezer on the porch,” Janet pointed out.

“Good point,” Jacob conceded.

“She’s nothing but a poor, frightened young woman who’s running away from someone or something that has her scared half to death,” Hazel said, echoing his own reluctant conclusions. “I’m certain of it.”

“Well, I’m not.” Jacob leaned his hips against the tiled countertop. He folded his arms across his chest. “But I promise not to harm a hair on her head.”

Almeda refused to be drawn into an argument. “Good. That’s settled. Remember, she’s our guest and she stays as long as she needs our hospitality.”

“It’s the Christian thing to do.”

“It is the season, after all,” Lois said quietly.

“It’s still November.”

“Close enough,” said Faye. “Christmas is my favorite time of year.”

Jacob set his coffee mug on the counter. “I give up. She stays as long as she wants. I’m going back up to my place to put some more wood in the stove. I’ll check on Weezer once more, then I’ll come back here and spend the night in my old room.”

“That sounds like an excellent idea.” Almeda seconded the suggestion. “We should all be in our beds.”

“Not me,” Janet said. “I’m going to watch Tales from the Crypt. Anyone care to join me?”

“No.” Hazel shuddered. “I hate that show. It gives me nightmares.”

“We’re going to bed,” the twins said, taking turns. “We’ve got a million things to do tomorrow.”

“I meant what I said about the lights on the roof,” Jacob reminded them. “Not till it thaws.”

“Of course.” They grinned. “If the sun comes out you can do it as soon as you get home from school.”

Jacob shook his head. He was defeated, and he knew it. “Good night.” He shrugged into his coat and headed out into the snow.

“He smiled,” Faye said in a stage whisper after he’d gone.

“And he laughed. Almost,” her twin sister added. “I can’t remember the last time I saw him laugh.”

It was many hours later when Jacob returned to the house. He’d forgotten the term papers that needed to be graded. But the back door was unlocked for him, as he knew it would be. His aunts were the most trusting souls on earth. And thank God, beyond ordinary common sense precautions, in Owenburg they still could be. He shook the snow off his coat and hung it on a hook by the door. He did the same with his hat, then took off his shoes. He walked through the house in his stocking feet, climbed the stairs and stopped before his father’s and his grandfather’s room.

He hadn’t slept here in months—he usually stayed only if the weather was very bad or his aunts were having problems with their temperamental old furnace—but he knew it would be ready for him. Probably with the bed already turned down and the radiator steaming.

He hesitated for a long minute, then walked silently down the hall to the room where Kate Smith and her son slept. He watched her from the open doorway. The soft glow of the wall lamps in the hall cast dim fingers of light all the way to the bed.

Kate Smith. He caught himself smiling again. If he had to pick a moment when he’d truly decided she wasn’t dangerous, it was then. She wasn’t much of a criminal if she couldn’t even pick an alias that didn’t make people think twice. But she’d told him to call her Katie. Katie. The name suited her much better than Kate.

She lay on her back, one arm outstretched toward her child, one lying across her chest, just beneath the gentle swell of her breasts. She had very nice breasts. He remembered the feel of them beneath her sweater as he’d carried her upstairs. Jacob looked quickly away. The baby slept beside her, on his stomach, his bottom high in the air.

Just the way his son used to sleep. His heart ached as he stood there staring at them.

And Katherine. How often had he teased her about putting the baby in bed with them. “We can’t make love,” he’d complain, “with a baby between us. It cramps my style and it will warp the boy for life.” Katherine would laugh. He would lean over, kiss the baby and she would put him in his own bed so that they could make love; long, slow, sweet love.

Jacob clenched his fists at his sides. He wouldn’t remember the soft, powdery baby smells, the giggles, the kisses exchanged with the woman he loved as she nursed his son, played pat-a-cake with him. The pain as they lowered them into the cold hard ground together. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. He would not give in to the pain.

Kate Smith bore a physical resemblance to Katherine, that was all. He could handle that. He didn’t have to exchange another half-dozen words with her. Tomorrow, or the day after that, she would be gone. Out of his life forever and he could go on, getting from one day to the next, making it through one more night, one more week, one more Christmas.

He gave the sleeping woman and her child a last look. Her short, dull gold hair gleamed faintly in the diffuse light. The little boy slept soundly, his thumb in his mouth. He looked like his mother, but his build was square and sturdy. Like his father? Kate, although tall, was slender as a child, skinny, really. Too skinny. Jacob liked his women with a little more meat on their bones.

The errant thought and his physical response to it surprised him, amazed him and scared him to death. Thinking about what Kate Smith would look like with an additional ten or twelve well-distributed pounds on her frame was too close to thinking about what it might be like to hold her, or kiss her, or make love to her. Doing that meant he would have to start feeling things again, letting his emotions stir to life, including the agony of remembering what he had lost. He wasn’t about to do that again for anyone. Not now. Not ever.

“Damn,” Greg Moran growled as he slammed down the receiver. “She won’t answer the phone.”

“Give her time to cool down,” his father counseled from his chair by the fire. He didn’t turn around. Neither did Greg. He remained by the inlaid wood desk that sat squarely in the middle of Andrew’s mahogany-paneled study. His hands balled into fists as he rested his elbows on either side of the phone. “She’ll come around. Patrice is a smart girl.”

“Maybe she’s already left town. Checked out of the hotel and went home to her family,” Greg said, following his own train of thought. He loved his wife. He hadn’t thought it was possible to miss her this much. He wanted her back, no matter what it took.

“We’d know. Someone follows her whenever she leaves the hotel,” his father reminded him.

“That’s another thing. I don’t want her finding out she’s being followed. I don’t want her hounded out of town.”

“Don’t worry,” Andrew said. “I’ve got my best guys on it. She’ll get tired of this game in a few days.”

“Sure, Dad.” But in his heart Greg wasn’t so certain. Maybe Patrice was right. Maybe they should let Katie go her own way.

“Patrice will come around,” Andrew repeated smugly. “In a few days you’ll have found my grandson and brought him home. Patrice won’t be able to stay away when she knows Kyle needs a woman to take care of him. She loves that boy like he was her own.”

“What if Katie won’t let us bring Kyle back here?” Greg asked.

“She won’t have any choice. Leave that all up to me. You just find her.” Andrew’s tone was hard as steel.

“She won’t give him up without a fight.” Greg hid a smile. Katie was a scrapper; even his father had to admit that.

“Remember. She’s got nothing to give the boy. We have everything, including the law, on our side.” Andrew chuckled. “Why do you think I make all those… campaign contributions…every election year?”

“Moran Enterprises makes campaign contributions for the same reasons every other company in this state does. To help elect the best man or woman for the job. Right, Dad,” Greg said, warningly.

“Sure, sure.” Andrew chuckled once more, then his voice hardened again. “Don’t try to con me. Are you trying to tell me you can’t find her?” He turned in his chair, his bald head shining softly in the mellow, recessed lighting. His stare was anything but mellow.

“I have a couple of leads,” Greg answered noncommittally. “It takes time to check them out. She’s only been gone three days. Right now I’m more interested in getting my wife to come home.”

“Three days is three damn days too long. You get the boy back here and your wife will come racing back so fast it’ll make your head spin.” Andrew brought his fist down on the arm of the chair. “The boy should be here with us. He’s our blood.”

For his father that was enough. For years it had been enough for Greg, too. Since the day he’d graduated from college he’d concentrated on turning Andrew’s ill-gotten gains into a legitimate business empire. For the most part he’d succeeded, although he wondered, sometimes, if his father didn’t stay in too close touch with his old pals from the syndicate. Were Katie’s glimpses of Andrew’s shady past one of the reasons she’d run away? He didn’t know. He couldn’t be sure.

But one thing he could be sure about. He’d spent all his life, forty-two years, trying his damnedest to please his old man, to make a success of Moran Enterprises and to rehabilitate the old sinner’s name. But it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough again. Not since Patrice had walked out on him and left an aching, empty chasm in the middle of his soul.

Outside the rain poured down from a leaden sky onto the lavishly landscaped grounds of the Key Biscayne hotel. Patrice smiled ruefully. If it wasn’t raining so hard, she could probably see Andrew’s mansion from here. She hadn’t run very far, but at least she had gone from her father-in-law’s house. The house she’d lived in with Gregory for twelve years, yet never thought of as her own, as theirs. Leaving Greg, taking a stand, that was the gesture she had to make. For Katie’s sake, and for her own.

She didn’t have her sister-in-law’s strength of purpose. Or her imagination. She’d never considered Andrew an evil person until the night Katie disappeared. Then she’d seen him for what he was: a ruthless, domineering man, skating the thin line between respectability and lawlessness. She didn’t care what Andrew had done in the past; that was all long ago and far away. Gregory said his father’s business dealings—his own business dealings—were legitimate now, and that’s all that mattered to her.

She missed Gregory. She wanted to be with her husband, to tell him about their child—the baby they’d wanted so desperately for so long. She was over four months pregnant. Her monthly cycles were so irregular she hadn’t realized, herself, she was pregnant until a few weeks ago. Now she was unable to share her joy with her husband until the situation between Katie and Andrew was resolved. That’s why she’d ignored the phone ringing behind her, was still ignoring its insistent summons. Because it was Gregory on the other end of the line, she knew in her heart, and because if he asked her, she would tell him what little she knew about where Katie had gone.

She couldn’t lie to Greg, even for Katie’s sake, but she couldn’t be a party to the scheme to take Kyle from his mother. That’s why she was here, in a hotel room, not two miles from her home, torn in mind and spirit, crying herself to sleep each night, instead of starting to plan for Christmas, her favorite time of the year. And this Christmas was to have been the most special of all, because her gift to Greg was their child.

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